During the Cold War, weapons of mass destruction were the centerpiece
of foreign policy. Nuclear arms hovered in the background of every major
issue in East-West competition and alliance relations. The highest
priorities of U.S. policy could almost all be linked in some way to the
danger of World War III and the fear of millions of casualties in the
American homeland.

Since the Cold War, other matters have displaced strategic concerns
on the foreign policy agenda, and that agenda itself is now barely on
the public's radar screen. Apart from defense policy professionals, few
Americans still lose sleep over weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After
all, what do normal people feel is the main relief provided by the end
of the Cold War? It is that the danger of nuclear war is off their
backs.

Yet today, WMD present more and different things to worry about than
during the Cold War. For one, nuclear arms are no longer the only
concern, as chemical and biological weapons have come to the fore. For
another, there is less danger of complete annihilation, but more danger
of mass destruction. Since the Cold War is over and American and Russian
nuclear inventories are much smaller, there is less chance of an
apocalyptic exchange of many thousands of weapons. But the probability
that some smaller number of WMD will be used is growing. Many of the
standard strategies and ideas for coping with WMD threats are no longer
as relevant as they were when Moscow was the main adversary. But new
thinking has not yet congealed in as clear a form as the Cold War
concepts of nuclear deterrence theory.

The new dangers have not been ignored inside the Beltway. "Counterproliferation"
has become a cottage industry in the Pentagon and the intelligence
community, and many worthwhile initiatives to cope with threats are
under way. Some of the most important implications of the new era,
however, have not yet registered on the public agenda. This in turn
limits the inclination of politicians to push some appropriate programs.
Even the defense establishment has directed its attention mainly toward
countering threats WMD pose to U.S. military forces operating abroad
rather than to the more worrisome danger that mass destruction will
occur in the United States, killing large numbers of civilians.

The points to keep in mind about the new world of mass destruction
are the following. First, the roles such weapons play in international
conflict are changing. They no longer represent the technological
frontier of warfare. Increasingly, they will be weapons of the weak --
states or groups that militarily are at best second-class. The
importance of the different types among them has also shifted.
Biological weapons should now be the most serious concern, with nuclear
weapons second and chemicals a distant third.

Second, the mainstays of Cold War security policy -- deterrence and
arms control -- are not what they used to be. Some new threats may not
be deterrable, and the role of arms control in dealing with WMD has been
marginalized. In a few instances, continuing devotion to deterrence and
arms control may have side effects that offset the benefits.

Third, some of the responses most likely to cope with the threats in
novel ways will not find a warm welcome. The response that should now be
the highest priority is one long ignored, opposed, or ridiculed: a
serious civil defense program to blunt the effects of WMD if they are
unleashed within the United States. Some of the most effective measures
to prevent attacks within the United States may also challenge
traditional civil liberties if pursued to the maximum. And the most
troubling conclusion for foreign policy as a whole is that reducing the
odds of attacks in the United States might require pulling back from
involvement in some foreign conflicts. American activism to guarantee
international stability is, paradoxically, the prime source of American
vulnerability.

This was partly true in the Cold War, when the main danger that
nuclear weapons might detonate on U.S. soil sprang from strategic
engagement in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East to deter attacks on U.S.
allies. But engagement then assumed a direct link between regional
stability and U.S. survival. The connection is less evident today, when
there is no globally threatening superpower or transnational ideology to
be contained -- only an array of serious but entirely local disruptions.
Today, as the only nation acting to police areas outside its own region,
the United States makes itself a target for states or groups whose
aspirations are frustrated by U.S. power.

FROM MODERN TO PRIMITIVE

When nuclear weapons were born, they represented the most advanced
military applications of science, technology, and engineering. None but
the great powers could hope to obtain them. By now, however, nuclear
arms have been around for more than half a century, and chemical and
biological weapons even longer. They are not just getting old. In the
strategic terms most relevant to American security, they have become
primitive. Once the military cutting edge of the strong, they have
become the only hope for so-called rogue states or terrorists who want
to contest American power. Why? Because the United States has developed
overwhelming superiority in conventional military force -- something it
never thought it had against the Soviet Union.

The Persian GulfWar of 1991 demonstrated the American advantage in a
manner that stunned many abroad. Although the U.S. defense budget has
plunged, other countries are not closing the gap. U.S. military spending
remains more than triple that of an potentially hostile power and higher
than the combined defense budgets of Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North
Korea, and Cuba.

More to the point, there is no evidence that those countries' level
of military professionalism is rising at a rate that would make them
competitive even if they were to spend far more on their forces. Rolling
along in what some see as a revolution in military affairs, American
forces continue to make unmatched use of state-of-the-art weapons,
surveillance and information systems and the organizational and
doctrinal flexibility for managing the integration of these complex
innovations into "systems of systems" that is the key to
modern military effectiveness. More than ever in military history,
brains are brawn. Even if hostile countries somehow catch up in an arms
race, their military organizations and cultures are unlikely to catch up
in the competence race for management, technology assimilation, and
combat command skills.

If it is infeasible for hostile states to counter the United States
in conventional combat, it is even more daunting for smaller groups such
as terrorists. If the United States is lucky, the various violent groups
with grievances against the American government and society will
continue to think up schemes using conventional explosives. Few
terrorist groups have shown an interest in inflicting true mass
destruction. Bombings or hostage seizures have generally threatened no
more than a few hundred lives. Let us hope that this limitation has been
due to a powerful underlying reason, rather than a simple lack of
capability, and that the few exceptions do not become more typical.

There is no sure reason to bet on such restraint. Indeed, some have
tried to use WMD, only to see them fizzle. The Japanese Aum Shinrikyo
cult released sarin nerve gas in Tokyo in 1995 but killed only a few
people, and some analysts believe that those who attacked the World
Trade Center in 1993 laced their bomb with cyanide, which burned up in
the explosion (this was not confirmed, but a large amount of cyanide was
found in the perpetrators' possession). Eventually such a group will
prove less incompetent. If terrorists decide that they want to stun
American policymakers by inflicting enormous damage, WMD become more
attractive at the same time that they are becoming more accessible.

Finally, unchallenged military superiority has shifted the attention
of the U.S. military establishment away from WMD. During the Cold War,
nuclear weapons were the bedrock of American war capabilities. They were
the linchpin of defense debate, procurement programs, and arms control
because the United States faced another superpower -- one that
conventional wisdom feared could best it in conventional warfare. Today,
no one cares about the MX missile or B-1 bomber, and hardly anyone
really cares about the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. In a manner that
could only have seemed ludicrous during the Cold War, proponents now
rationalize the $2 billion B-2 as a weapon for conventional war. Hardly
anyone in the Pentagon is still interested in how the United States
could use WMD for its own strategic purposes.

What military planners are interested in is how to keep adversaries
from using WMD as an "asymmetric" means to counter U.S.
conventional power, and how to protect U.S. ground and naval forces
abroad from WMD attacks. This concern is all well and good, but it abets
a drift of attention away from the main danger. The primary risk is not
that enemies might lob some nuclear or chemical weapons at U.S. armored
battalions or ships, awful as that would be. Rather, it is that they
might attempt to punish the United States by triggering catastrophes in
American cities.

CHOOSE YOUR WEAPONS WELL

Until the past decade, the issue was nuclear arms, period. Chemical
weapons received some attention from specialists, but never made the
priority list of presidents and cabinets. Biological weapons were almost
forgotten after they were banned by the 1972 Biological Weapons
Convention. Chemical and biological arms have received more attention in
the 1990s. The issues posed by the trio lumped under the umbrella of
mass destruction differ, however. Most significantly. biological weapons
have received less attention than the others but probably represent the
greatest danger.

Chemical weapons have been noticed more in the past decade,
especially since they were used by Iraq against Iranian troops in the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and against Kurdish civilians in 1988. Chemicals
are far more widely available than nuclear weapons because the
technology required to produce them is far simpler, and large numbers of
countries have undertaken chemical weapons programs. But chemical
weapons are not really in the same class as other weapons of mass
destruction, in the sense of ability to inflict a huge number of
civilian casualties in a single strike. For the tens of thousands of
fatalities as in, say, the biggest strategic bombing raids of World War
II, it would be very difficult logistically and operationally to deliver
chemical weapons in necessary quantities over wide areas.

Nevertheless, much attention and effort have been lavished on a
campaign to eradicate chemical weapons. This may be a good thing, but
the side effects are not entirely benign. For one, banning chemicals
means that for deterrence, nuclear weapons become even more important
than they used to be. That is because a treaty cannot assuredly prevent
hostile nations from deploying chemical weapons, while the United States
has forsworn the option to retaliate in kind.

In the past, the United States had a no-first-use policy for chemical
weapons but reserved the right to strike back with them if an enemy used
them first. The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which entered
into force last April, requires the United States to destroy its
stockpile, thus ending this option. The United States did the same with
biological arms long ago, during the Nixon administration. Eliminating
its own chemical and biological weapons practically precludes a
no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons, since they become the only WMD
available for retaliation.

Would the United States follow through and use nuclear weapons
against a country or group that had killed several thousand Americans
with deadly chemicals? It is hard to imagine breaking the post-Nagasaki
taboo in that situation. But schemes for conventional military
retaliation would not suffice without detracting from the force of
American deterrent threats. There would be a risk for the United States
in setting a precedent that someone could use WMD against Americans
without suffering similar destruction in return. Limiting the range of
deterrent alternatives available to U.S. strategy will not necessarily
cause deterrence to fall, but it will certainly not strengthen it.

The ostensible benefit of the cwc is that it will make chemical arms
harder to acquire and every bit as illegal and stigmatized as biological
weapons have been for a quarter-century. If it has that benefit, what
effect will the ban have on the choices of countries or groups who want
some kind of WMD in any case, whether for purposes of deterrence,
aggression, or revenge? At the margin, the ban will reduce the
disincentives to acquiring biological weapons, since they will be no
less illegal, no harder to obtain or conceal, and far more damaging than
chemical weapons. If major reductions in the chemical threat produce
even minor increases in the biological threat, it win be a bad trade.

One simple fact should worry Americans more about biological than
about nuclear or chemical arms: unlike either of the other two,
biological weapons combine maximum destructiveness and easy
availability. Nuclear arms have great killing capacity but are hard to
get; chemical weapons are easy to get but lack such killing capacity;
biological agents have both qualities. A 1993 study by the Office of
Technology Assessment concluded that a single airplane delivering 100
kilograms of anthrax spores -- a dormant phase of a bacillus that
multiplies rapidly in the body, producing toxins and rapid hemorrhaging
-- by aerosol on a clear, calm night over the Washington, D.C., area
could kill between one million and three million people, 300 times as
many fatalities as if the plane had delivered sarin gas in amounts ten
times larger.(1)

Like chemical weapons but unlike nuclear weapons, biologicals are
relatively easy to make. Innovations in biotechnology have obviated many
of the old problems in handling and preserving biological agents, and
many have been freely available for scientific research. Nuclear weapons
are not likely to be the WMD of choice for non-state terrorist groups.
They require huge investments and targetable infrastructure, and are
subject to credible threats by the United States. An aggrieved group
that decides it wants to kill huge numbers of Americans will find the
mission easier to accomplish with anthrax than with a nuclear explosion.

Inside the Pentagon, concern about biological weapons has picked up
tremendously in the past couple of years, but there is little serious
attention to the problem elsewhere. This could be a good thing if
nothing much can be done, since publicity might only give enemies ideas.
But it is a bad thing if it impedes efforts to take steps -- such as
civil defense -- that could blunt nuclear, chemical, or biological
attacks.

DETERRENCE AND ARMS CONTROL IN DECLINE

An old vocabulary still dominates policy discussion of WMD. Rhetoric
in the defense establishment falls back on the all-purpose strategic
buzzword of the Cold War: deterrence. But deterrence now covers fewer of
the threats the United States faces than it did during the Cold War.

The logic of deterrence is clearest when the issue is preventing
unprovoked and unambiguous aggression, when the aggressor recognizes
that it is the aggressor rather than the defender. Deterrence is less
reliable when both sides in a conflict see each other as the aggressor.
When the United States intervenes in messy Third World conflicts, the
latter is often true. In such cases, the side that the United States
wants to deter may see itself as trying to deter the United States. Such
situations are ripe for miscalculation.

For the country that used to be the object of U.S. deterrence --
Russia -- the strategic burden has been reversed. Based on assumptions
of Soviet conventional military superiority, U.S. strategy used to rely
on the threat to escalate -- to be the first to use nuclear weapons
during a war -- to deter attack by Soviet armored divisions. Today the
tables have turned. There is no Warsaw Pact, Russia has half or less of
the military potential of the Soviet Union, and its current conventional
forces are in disarray, while NATO is expanding eastward. It is now
Moscow that has the incentive to compensate for conventional weakness by
placing heavier reliance on nuclear capabilities. The Russians adopted a
nuclear no-first-use policy in the early 1980s, but renounced it after
their precipitous post -- Cold War decline.

Today Russia needs to be reassured, not deterred. The main danger
from Russian WMD is leakage from vast stockpiles to anti-American groups
elsewhere -- the "loose nukes" problem. So long as the United
States has no intention of attacking the Russians, their greater
reliance on nuclear forces is not a problem. If the United States has an
interest in reducing nuclear stockpiles, however, it is. The traditional
American approach -- thinking in terms of its own deterrence strategies
-- provides no guidance. Indeed, noises some Americans still make about
deterring the Russians compound the problem by reinforcing Moscow's
alarm.

Similarly, U.S. conventional military superiority gives China an
incentive to consider more reliance on an escalation strategy. The
Chinese have a long-standing no-first-use policy but adopted it when
their strategic doctrine was that of "people's war," which
relied on mass mobilization and low-tech weaponry. Faith in that
doctrine was severely shaken by the American performance in the Persian
Gulf War. Again, the United States might assume that there is no problem
as long as Beijing only wants to deter and the United States does not
want to attack. But how do these assumptions relate to the prospect of a
war over Taiwan? That is a conflict that no one wants but that can
hardly be ruled out in light of evolving tensions. If the United States
decides openly to deter Beijing from attacking Taiwan, the old lore from
the Cold War may be relevant. But if Washington continues to leave
policy ambiguous, who will know who is deterring whom? Ambiguity is a
recipe for confusion and miscalculation in a time of crisis. For all the
upsurge of attention in the national security establishment to the
prospect of conflict with China, there has been remarkably little
discussion of the role of nuclear weapons in a Sino-American collision.

The main problem for deterrence, however, is that it still relies on
the corpus of theory that undergirded Cold War policy, dominated by
reliance on the threat of second-strike retaliation. But retaliation
requires knowledge of who has launched an attack and the address at
which they reside. These requirements are not a problem when the threat
comes from a government, but they are if the enemy is anonymous. Today
some groups may wish to punish the United States without taking credit
for the action -- a mass killing equivalent to the i988 bombing of Pan
Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Moreover, the options the
defense establishment favors have shifted over entirely from deterrence
to preemption. The majority of those who dealt with nuclear weapons
policy during the Cold War adamantly opposed developing first-strike
options. Today, scarcely anyone looks to that old logic when thinking
about rogues or terrorists, and most hope to be able to mount a
disarming action against any group with WMD.

Finally, eliminating chemical weapons trims some options for
deterrence. Arms control restrictions on the instruments that can be
used for deterrent threats are not necessarily the wrong policy, but
they do work against maximizing deterrence. Overall, however, the
problem with arms control is not that it does too much but that it now
does relatively little.

From the Limited Test Ban negotiations in the 1960s through the
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces negotiations in the 1970s and 1980s,
arms control treaties were central to managing WMD threats. Debates
about whether particular agreements with Moscow were in the United
States' interest were bitter because everyone believed that the results
mattered. Today there is no consensus that treaties regulating armaments
matter much. Among national security experts, the corps that pays close
attention to start and Conventional Forces in Europe negotiations has
shrunk. With the exception of the Chemical Weapons Convention, efforts
to control WMD by treaty have become small potatoes. The biggest recent
news in arms control has not been any negotiation to regulate WMD, but a
campaign to ban land mines.

The United States' Cold War partner in arms control, Russia, has
disarmed a great deal voluntarily. But despite standard rhetoric, the
United States has not placed a high priority on convincing Moscow to
divest itself of more of its nuclear weapons; the Clinton administration
has chosen to promote NATO expansion, which pushes the Russians in the
opposite direction.

The 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty remains a hallowed
institution, but it has nowhere new to go. It will not convert the
problem countries that want to obtain WMD -- unless, like Iraq and North
Korea in the 1980s, they sign and accept the legal obligation and then
simply cheat. The NPT regime will continue to impede access to fissile
materials on the open market, but it will not do so in novel or more
effective ways. And it does not address the problem of Russian
"loose nukes" any better than the Russian and American
governments do on their own.

CIVIL DEFENSE

Despite all the new limitations, deterrence remains an important
aspect of strategy. There is not much the United States needs to do to
keep up its deterrence capability, however, given the thousands of
nuclear weapons and the conventional military superiority it has. Where
capabilities are grossly underdeveloped, however, is the area of
responses for coping should deterrence fail.

Enthusiasts for defensive capability, mostly proponents of the
Strategic Defense Initiative from the Reagan years, remain fixated on
the least relevant form of it: high-tech active defenses to intercept
ballistic missiles. There is still scant interest in what should now be
the first priority: civil defense preparations to cope with uses of WMD
within the United States. Active defenses against missiles would be
expensive investments that might or might not work against a threat the
United States probably will not face for years, but would do nothing
against the threat it already faces. Civil defense measures are
extremely cheap and could prove far more effective than they would have
against a large-scale Soviet attack.

During the Cold War, debate about antimissile defense concerned
whether it was technologically feasible or cost-effective and whether it
would threaten the Soviets and ignite a spiraling arms race between
offensive and defensive weapons. One need not refight the battles over
SDI to see that the relevance to current WMD threats is tenuous. Iraq,
Iran, or North Korea will not be able to deploy intercontinental
missiles for years. Nor, if they are strategically cunning, should they
want to. For the limited number of nuclear warheads these countries are
likely to have, and especially for biological weapons, other means of
delivery are more easily available. Alternatives to ballistic missiles
include aircraft, ship-launched cruise missiles, and unconventional
means, such as smuggling, at which the intelligence agencies of these
countries have excelled. Non-state perpetrators like those who bombed
the World Trade Center will choose clandestine means of necessity.

A ballistic missile defense system, whether it costs more or less
than the $60 billion the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated
would be required for one limited option, will not counter these modes
of attack. Indeed, if a larger part of the worry about WMD these days is
about their use by terrorist states or groups, the odds are higher that
sometime, somewhere in the country, some of these weapons will go off,
despite the best efforts to stop them. If that happens, the United
States should have in place whatever measures can mitigate the
consequences.

By the later phases of the Cold War it was hard to get people
interested in civil defense against an all-out Soviet attack that could
detonate thousands of high-yield nuclear weapons in U.S. population
centers. To many, the lives that would have been saved seemed less
salient than the many millions that would still have been lost. It
should be easier to see the value of civil defense, however, in the
context of more limited attacks, perhaps with only a few low-yield
weapons. A host of minor measures can increase protection or recovery
from biological, nuclear, or chemical effects. Examples are stockpiling
or distribution of protective masks; equipment and training for
decontamination; standby programs for mass vaccinations and emergency
treatment with antibiotics; wider and deeper planning of emergency
response procedures; and public education about hasty sheltering and
emergency actions to reduce individual vulnerability.

Such programs would not make absorbing a WMD attack tolerable. But
inadequacy is no excuse for neglecting actions that could reduce death
and suffering, even if the difference in casualties is small. Civil
defenses are especially worthwhile considering that they are
extraordinarily cheap compared with regular military programs or active
defense systems. Yet until recently, only half a billion dollar -- less
than two-tenths of one percent of the defense budget and less than $2 a
head for every American -- went to chemical and biological defense,
while nearly $4 billion was spent annually on ballistic missile
defense.(2) Why haven't policymakers attended to first things first --
cheap programs that can cushion the effects of a disaster -- before
undertaking expensive programs that provide no assurance they will be
able to prevent it?

One problem is conceptual inertia. The Cold War accustomed
strategists to worrying about an enemy with thousands of WMD, rather
than foes with a handful. For decades the question of strategic defense
was also posed as a debate between those who saw no alternative to
relying on deterrence and those who hoped that an astrodome over the
United States could replace deterrence with invulnerability. None of
these hoary fixations address the most probable WMD threats in the
post-Cold War world.

Opposition to Cold War civil defense programs underlies psychological
aversion to them now. Opponents used to argue that civil defense was a
dangerous illusion because it could do nothing significant to reduce the
horror of an attack that would obliterate hundreds of cities, because it
would promote a false sense of security, and because it could even be
destabilizing and provoke attack in a crisis. Whether or not such
arguments were valid then, they are not now. But both then and now,
there has been a powerful reason that civil defense efforts have been
unpopular: they alarm people. They remind them that their vulnerability
to mass destruction is not a bad dream, not something that strategic
schemes for deterrence, preemption, or interception are sure to solve.

Civil defense can limit damage but not minimize it. For example, some
opponents may be able to develop biological agents that circumvent
available vaccines and antibiotics. (Those with marginal technical
capabilities, however, might be stopped by blocking the easier options.)
Which is worse -- the limitations of defenses, or having to answer for
failure to try? The moment that WMD are used somewhere in a manner that
produces tens of thousands of fatalities, there will be hysterical
outbursts of all sorts. One of them will surely be, "Why didn't the
government prepare us for this?" It is not in the long-term
interest of political leaders to indulge popular aversion. If public
resistance under current circumstances prevents widespread distribution,
stockpiling, and instruction in the use of defensive equipment or
medical services, the least that should be done is to optimize plans and
preparations to rapidly implement such activities when the first crisis
ignites demand.

As threats of terrorism using WMD are taken more seriously, interest
will grow in preemptive defense measures -- the most obvious of which is
intensified intelligence collection. Where this involves targeting
groups within the United States that might seem to be potential breeding
grounds for terrorists (for example, supporters of Palestinian
militants, home-grown militias or cults, or radicals with ties to Iran,
Iraq, or Libya), controversies will arise over constitutional limits on
invasion of privacy or search and seizure. So long as the WMD danger
remains hypothetical, such controversies will not be easily resolved.
They have not come to the fore so far because U.S. law enforcement has
been unbelievably lucky in apprehending terrorists. The group arrested
in 1993 for planning to bomb the Lincoln Tunnel happened to be
infiltrated by an informer, and Timothy McVeigh happened to be picked up
in 1995 for driving without a license plate. Those who fear compromising
civil liberties with permissive standards for government snooping should
consider what is likely to happen once such luck runs out and it proves
impossible to identify perpetrators. Suppose a secretive radical Islamic
group launches a biological attack, kills 100,000 people, and announces
that it will do the same thing again if its terms are not met. (The
probability of such a scenario may not be high, but it can no longer be
consigned to science fiction.) In that case, it is hardly unthinkable
that a panicked legal system would won over and treat Arab-Americans as
it did the Japanese-Americans who were herded into concentration camps
after Pearl Harbor. Stretching limits on domestic surveillance to reduce
the chances of facing such choices could be the lesser evil.

IS RETREAT THE BEST DEFENSE?

No programs aimed at controlling adversaries' capabilities can
eliminate the dangers. One risk is that in the more fluid politics of
the post-Cold War world, the United States could stumble into an
unanticipated crisis with Russia or China. There are no well-established
rules of the game to brake a spiraling conflict over the Baltic states
or Taiwan, as there were in the superpower competition after the Cuban
missile crisis. The second danger is that some angry group that blames
the United States for its problems may decide to coerce Americans, or
simply exact vengeance, by inflicting devastation on them where they
live.

If steps to deal with the problem in terms of capabilities are
limited, can anything be done to address intentions -- the incentives of
any foreign power or group to lash out at the United States? There are
few answers to this question that do not compromise the fundamental
strategic activism and internationalist thrust of U.S. foreign policy
over the past half-century. That is because the best way to keep people
from believing that the United States is responsible for their problems
is to avoid involvement in their conflicts.

Ever since the Munich agreement and Pearl Harbor, with only a brief
interruption during the decade after the Tet offensive, there has been a
consensus that if Americans did not draw their defense perimeter far
forward and confront foreign troubles in their early stages, those
troubles would come to them at home. But because the United States is
now the only superpower and weapons of mass destruction have become more
accessible, American intervention in troubled areas is not so much a way
to fend off such threats as it is what stirs them up.

Will U.S. involvement in unstable situations around the former
U.S.S.R. head off conflict with Moscow or generate it? Will making NATO
bigger and moving it to Russia's doorstep deter Russian pressure on
Ukraine and the Baltics or provoke it? With Russia and China, there is
less chance that either will set out to conquer Europe or Asia than that
they will try to restore old sovereignties and security zones by
reincorporating new states of the former Soviet Union or the province of
Taiwan. None of this means that NATO expansion or support for Taiwan's
autonomy will cause nuclear war. It does mean that to whatever extent
American activism increases those countries' incentives to rely on WMD
while intensifying political friction between them and Washington, it is
counterproductive.

The other main danger is the ire of smaller states or religious and
cultural groups that see the United States as an evil force blocking
their legitimate aspirations. It is hardly likely that Middle Eastern
radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction of the World
Trade Center if the United States had not been identified for so long as
the mainstay of Israel, the shah of Iran, and conservative Arab regimes
and the source of a cultural assault on Islam. Cold War triumph
magnified the problem. U.S. military and cultural hegemony -- the basic
threats to radicals seeking to challenge the status quo -- are directly
linked to the imputation of American responsibility for maintaining
world order. Playing Globocop feeds the urge of aggrieved groups to
strike back.

Is this a brief for isolationism? No. It is too late to turn off
foreign resentments by retreating, even if that were an acceptable
course. Alienated groups and governments would not stop blaming
Washington for their problems. In addition, there is more to foreign
policy than dampening incentives to hurt the United States. It is not
automatically sensible to stop pursuing other interests for the sake of
uncertain reductions in a threat of uncertain probability. Security is
not all of a piece, and survival is only part of security.

But it is no longer prudent to assume that important security
interests complement each other as they did during the Cold War. The
interest at the very core -- protecting the American homeland from
attack -- may now often be in conflict with security more broadly
conceived and with the interests that mandate promoting American
political values, economic interdependence, social Westernization, and
stability in regions beyond Western Europe and the Americas. The United
States should not give up all its broader political interests, but it
should tread cautiously in areas -- especially the Middle East -- where
broader interests grate against the core imperative of preventing mass
destruction within America's borders.

Richard K. Betts is Director of National Security Studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations and Professor of Political Science and
Director of the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia
University.